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A Candle Cove Anecdote

Loved this show. Horace Horrible was my favorite. I remember looking everywhere for his action figure but Kiddie City and KB had never even heard of the line. I finally found a talking Horace, good as new, at somebody’s yard sale, though I didn’t see a house around and never saw those people again. I was pretty excited, and ran right to my friend’s house to gloat.

When his mom answered the door, she let out the most guttural scream I’d ever heard, absolutely scaring the shit out of me. She told me to get lost with “that thing” and slammed the door in my face. My kid-logic concluded that she must have known I bought a toy from a stranger completely unsupervised, and that it must have been an even more serious crime than I thought.

So, I did my best to keep Horace hidden, especially from my own parents, but his voice chip was pretty damn loud, and every so often he’d go off by himself, like his battery was dying. My mom kept asking if Marble (our cat) was in my room…I don’t know how you mistake that goofy chuckling for a cat.

It was subtle at first, but after a few days he started to smell weird. His voice kept getting weaker and more garbled, and his joints kept getting looser like they were ready to drop off. I was afraid of getting caught and we didn’t have trash pickup, so I did what a rational child does when he thinks he has contraband and buried it in the woods.

I never found another one or figured out what was wrong with him, but it’s the weirdest thing; a tree grew where I left him, I shit you not, in just a couple weeks. It never grew leaves and it never got much taller than me, but it’s there to this day, and every summer it swarms with disturbing numbers of flies.

–
Written by that one guy who runs bogleech.com, as a follow-up to the original Candle Cove story, which you should probably read if you haven’t already – it will make this story make much more sense. Also, CC originally hails from Ichor Falls, so make sure to pay them a visit… and be sure to check out their new book: Ichor Falls: A Visitor’s Guide: Short stories from a quiet community (Volume 1). Sorry if this reads like an ad, I’m just excited for them and I know that lots of you guys are fans of Candle Cove so I wanted to share!

The Black Tabby Cat

Today was the day he was dreading. He knew they were going to be extremely busy, and quite frankly he wanted to call out seeing as he was already late. His thoughts were briefly distracted by his black tabby, quietly pawing at his legs, ready for its breakfast. He made sure to fill up its bowl before he dashed out the door, returning twice to grab whatever he forgot the first few times. And he was off.

He breathed a sigh of relief as the last customer left. It had been the best sales day of the year, and they were obviously going to celebrate. He had been contemplating going on home, but he needed to unwind too. He had no serious obligations the next day, so he could stay out as late as he wanted. So when they asked, he happily agreed to go with them.

He couldn’t open his eyes. He was barely conscious as it was. He slapped lazily around until he managed to shut the alarm off, before he rolled onto his stomach and buried his face in his pillow. The door creaked as his black tabby walked in and jumped onto his back, where it curled up close to his head. The hot breath in his ear lulled him back to sleep.

The doorbell continued to ring. He crawled out of bed and made his way to the front door. It was his next door neighbor, a kind woman in her late seventies, who still worked. She was in her business suit, holding a trash bag. “Oh did I wake you up? I thought you were usually up by now.” “I usually am.” He said groggily. “But they let me have today off.” “Well I hate to come bearing such bad news so early in the morning,” She said, patting his hand, “but I ran over your dear tabby last night when I got home. I came straight over to tell you but you weren’t home.” He stared at her for a few seconds, before their silence was broken by its footsteps.

Gateway Of The Mind

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing to left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his nonfunctional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.

A Moment’s Clarity

When Anita found him, her immediate reaction was to put him in the foyer next to the stairwell so he could be decorative. Not everyone would have one, and the way his arms stuck out just so would make him a suitable hat rack. She realized, almost too late, that this might have been in bad taste. But what, she thought, was a woman supposed to do when her husband went and turned into a glass statue overnight?

She had heard of this happening, of course. It just seemed to happen to other people; one day they were perfectly normal and then the next, someone found them frozen. Clear. She had heard of it, but had never seriously considered it happening to her. The people this happened to were far too glamorous; celebrities and the like. Certainly not to him. She was a widow now. That made her feel old at thirty-seven years and she was sure she didn’t like it.

After a week she quietly filed a mortician’s report and sat down to a cup of hot tea. She hadn’t broken it to his family yet, though his sister had been calling. She told her he was away on business. There was no reason to tell them yet. The Quentins could wait another day to hear their little boy wasn’t okay. At that very moment it occurred to her that using her husband’s remains as a hat rack might be poorly received by the general public.

And so Anita began the difficult task of finding a place for him. At first she kept him to the study, in front of the fireplace. He kept her company with her tea. But soon she began to find that sitting with the countenance of her dead husband reminded her of her widowhood, so she moved him to the garden and used him to scare the crows away from her tomatoes. He did little to dissuade the crows, however, and soon became their favorite perch. Finally, she hauled him to the attic. She kept the rest of her glass figurines there, and didn’t see why he should be treated any differently.

Somehow, it all seemed normal at the time. Everywhere you looked someone was at it. The glass bodies seemed to multiply. When she called her husband’s mother and told her, tearfully, that he had passed away, she burst into hysterics and told her that so had one of the grandchildren.

Anita was uncomfortable, and then she hung up.

When the man who cut her lawn succumbed as well, she began to worry. Now it was affecting her everyday life, which was something her husband and niece had not generally been part of. Her husband worked constantly and usually slept when he graced her with his presence. Her niece, whose name she couldn’t even remember, lived in Florida.

She put entirely too much sugar in her tea and shivered as she drank it. She did miss her husband. Sometimes. And now she would have to trim her own lawn.

Her first hint that something might have been a bit off was when she found her neighbor, frozen solid while pulling the weeds in his yard. The next day, while shopping for groceries the bag boy, with a crackle, transformed, still clutching her biscotti. She tenderly wrenched it from his grip, glanced around halfheartedly, and didn’t pay.

Then the news reports began to get very tiresome. First it was strange, isolated events. Then it was an epidemic, then a pandemic, and then it was Susan Shepherd reporting to you live from New York City and…crackle.

Ting.

Suddenly, she wasn’t reporting. Suddenly, she wasn’t even alive.

Continue Reading…

The Night Wire

“New York, September 30 CP FLASH

“Ambassador Holliwell died here today. The end came
suddenly as the ambassador was alone in his study….”

There is something ungodly about these night wire jobs. You sit up here on the top floor of a skyscraper and listen in to the whispers of a civilization. New York, London, Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore — they’re your next-door neighbors after the streetlights go dim and the world has gone to sleep.

Alone in the quiet hours between two and four, the receiving operators doze over their sounders and the news comes in. Fires and disasters and suicides. Murders, crowds, catastrophes. Sometimes an earthquake with a casualty list as long as your arm. The night wire man takes it down almost in his sleep, picking it off on his typewriter with one finger.

Once in a long time you prick up your ears and listen. You’ve heard of some one you knew in Singapore, Halifax or Paris, long ago. Maybe they’ve been promoted, but more probably they’ve been murdered or drowned. Perhaps they just decided to quit and took some bizarre way out. Made it interesting enough to get in the news.

But that doesn’t happen often. Most of the time you sit and doze and tap, tap on your typewriter and wish you were home in bed.

Sometimes, though, queer things happen. One did the other night, and I haven’t got over it yet. I wish I could.

You see, I handle the night manager’s desk in a western seaport town; what the name is, doesn’t matter.

There is, or rather was, only one night operator on my staff, a fellow named John Morgan, about forty years of age, I should say, and a sober, hard-working sort.

He was one of the best operators I ever knew, what is known as a “double” man. That means he could handle two instruments at once and type the stories on different typewriters at the same time. He was one of the three men I ever knew who could do it consistently, hour after hour, and never make a mistake.

Generally, we used only one wire at night, but sometimes, when it was late and the news was coming fast, the Chicago and Denver stations would open a second wire, and then Morgan would do his stuff. He was a wizard, a mechanical automatic wizard which functioned marvelously but was without imagination.

On the night of the sixteenth he complained of feeling tired. It was the first and last time I had ever heard him say a word about himself, and I had known him for three years.

It was just three o’clock and we were running only one wire. I was nodding over the reports at my desk and not paying much attention to him, when he spoke.

“Jim,” he said, “does it feel close in here to you?”
“Why, no, John,” I answered, “but I’ll open a window if you like.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I reckon I’m just a little tired.”

That was all that was said, and I went on working. Every ten minutes or so I would walk over and take a pile of copy that had stacked up neatly beside the typewriter as the messages were printed out in triplicate.

It must have been twenty minutes after he spoke that I noticed he had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very “hot” coming in. On my next trip I picked up the copy from both machines and took it back to my desk to sort out the duplicates.

The first wire was running out the usual sort of stuff and I just looked over it hurridly. Then I turned to the second pile of copy. I remembered it particularly because the story was from a town I had never heard of: “Xebico.” Here is the dispatch. I saved a duplicate of it from our files:

“Xebico, Sept 16 CP BULLETIN

“The heaviest mist in the history of the city settled over
the town at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. All traffic has
stopped and the mist hangs like a pall over everything. Lights
of ordinary intensity fail to pierce the fog, which is
constantly growing heavier.

“Scientists here are unable to agree as to the cause, and
the local weather bureau states that the like has never occurred
before in the history of the city.

“At 7 P.M. last night the municipal authorities… (more)”

That was all there was. Nothing out of the ordinary at a bureau headquarters, but, as I say, I noticed the story because of the name of the town.

Continue Reading…

High Frequency

The most amazing and the most horrible thing just happened to me. I’ve stumbled upon a discovery of a lifetime, but at the same time I wish I could undiscover it.

I was actually just tampering around with some music programs creating ambience tracks. You see, ever since I was 12 or so I’d play music when I went to sleep…it kind of helped to calm my nerves like a lullaby, however much you could consider music by The Verve, or Everclear “lullabies.” Well in recent years I’ve really gotten big into ambient music, as it helps me clear my mind, focus my creative energies, like a meditation. No, I’m not a Buddhist, I don’t see it as a spiritual thing and I don’t try to focus my “chi” I just like to clear my head sometimes and I think ambience helps.

Well lately I’ve been making my own ambience and I’m quite satisfied with it, but I found different types bring different images, especially to the subconscious, sleeping brain. I hypothesized it had something to do with the pitch, and the frequency. I made a number of different tracks, all of them very long, and each one at a different frequency. I found that the lower frequencies tap into my darker thoughts so I tried dealing with higher frequencies and my next few nights sleeping my dreams were a confused jumble of images.

I tried higher frequencies but they just gave me a headache the louder it got until I went to the threshold, just below twenty thousand hertz. It started out there, as a low hum in the back of my brain, and slowly crept higher. Half the track was all but inaudible, but I was satisfied with it. That evening I threw it on as I went to bed.

I awoke staring at the stars. At first I thought I was dreaming that I was lying in an open field stargazing, but I could feel the bed beneath me, bedsprings creaking as I moved. I sat up on the edge of the bed and looked around the room…and though I could see the floor, and the walls, I could also see through them to the ground beneath. I could see the neighbor’s houses, and at the same time I could see through them. I could still hear the ambience, just slightly, but I could also hear the heater moaning overhead. The sound kept growing louder, like wind through a tunnel.

I didn’t remember putting the track on loop but it was still playing despite the fact that it seemed to be dawn. I watched as light spilled across the sky, staining it blood red with unnerving rapidness. With the light came shadows, stretching out from the bases of trees and growing out of bushes. Out of those shadows poured living blankets of crawling and squirming insects, the black pool of vermin spread and slowly flooded the yard as I watched. As the rippling pools expanded I could see what looked like limbs moving under their depths, the flailing arms of a drowning victim lost in a sea of roaches and centipedes…crickets and spiders.

I watched these pools expand to the edges of the house and then they began to filter inside. I watched them pour into cracks under the doors and through the edges of slightly cracked windows. They filled the walls and filtered through the ceiling. I could see the shapes inside the growing sea of bugs more clearly then, as they splashed up, gasping for air. Constructed of bugs but flailing to get free of the bugs all at the same time, their hands reached out to me as their dark, empty eyes begged my assistance. I wrapped my blanket tighter around me, knowing any minute they’d be on the bed with me. Their chirping and rustling and squeaking and buzzing noises filled my head, and I could not escape it even with hands over both ears. Then I heard the voices, singing softly like sirens on a distant shore. Their words had significant meaning I knew, but the language was ancient, melodic but utterly unhuman in nature. It grew louder but remained just as distant, and it cut through the constant buzz of the bugs like a warm knife through butter.

Continue Reading…

Farewell

Hello.

I have spent the past months among humanity, and I am quite disappointed. After a great many queries and searching out suitable aspirants, it seems as though this age is rife with a population whom seem content to treat the unknown as naught but a petty diversion or a thing to be mocked out of ignorance.

Thus, my decision is made.

The lot of you are unworthy of the End.

What passionless, empty fools humans have become. Even those of intellectual brilliance are lacking in passion and while away their time on matters wholly of the material realm, blindly blathering on that which cannot be sensed by human sensory organs and machines wrought by human hands does not exist.

Your culture is tainted with such thoughts.

Thoughts which seek for answers.

There are no answers.

You are peasants.

No.

Peasants believed in the unknown and feared it, and justifiably so.

No.

You are less than peasants.

If any among you espouse such ideals as to actually seek out the intangible unknown and to gain a semblance of understanding for a universe greater than the materialist beliefs which have spread throughout your species, I charge you with seeking out such things in a scholarly fashion.

Research these ideas long-buried and unveil powers and entities beyond mortal ken. Learn of societies who dared look into the Darkness and exulted in their fear to espy worlds filled with that which only dreams may begin to duplicate. Study those humans who dared mix the studies of the natural world with the world unseen and their impossible discoveries.

Stoke the flames of your mind and place your energies into questioning the world in all ways possible.

Or carry on as you are and rot from within.

As for myself, I will return to my repose and await a time when either humanity is a withered husk of what it once was or realizes its potential and uplifts itself to heights I have only begun to taste in my long existence.

Until that time.

Farewell.

–
Peace out, Mr. Welldone <3

Awakening

You’re awoken from a dreamless sleep by a dull thud from the hallway. Your eyes snap open and fix instantly on the door. What made that noise? Breathing hard, fear beginning to twitch in your mind, you realise with a shiver that you’ve kicked your duvet off in your sleep. You quickly grab it, pull it around you and unconsciously begin to tuck it around yourself tightly as you curl up, leaving no part exposed. You become a warm, safe ball: coiled, leaving only a small gap between the duvet and mattress so you can see out, pillows becoming shields between your head and the wall. You are briefly reminded of your childhood, hiding from imaginary bogeymen. But this feels more palpable, more dangerous.

Another thud. This time, it seems louder, deeper, coming from just outside. Trying to keep calm, you run through all the things it Has To Be: the pipes in the wall, which have been groaning for weeks now, with ever-increasing frequency and urgency (they were never this deep or this loud). The blind in the bathroom, left to flap by an open window (you double-check all the doors and windows each night). Perhaps it’s your parents, returning late and drunk (they’re away on a cruise for another week). Your cat, prowling through the house at night (you put it out that evening). Despite all your desperate reassurances, you feel the fear turn to panic, and you pull the duvet tighter around yourself, reducing your field of vision to a thin chink.

Another. The loudest yet, just inches from your door. Your churning brain conjures images straight from your childhood nightmares – masked psychopaths, giant spiders, shape shifting creatures: amalgamations of bone and gristle, twitching their way across the floor, scrabbling with twisted limbs for the door handle, then scuttling in with a burst of speed, claws grasping for your quivering body.

Another. Your breathing is hoarse and shallow now, mere gasps in a suddenly dry throat, lungs closing up, stomach churning and roiling, eyes wide and fixed. Your blanket is still tucked vice-like around you, your body pinioned underneath its futile protection, just inches of cotton between you and whatever is about to burst in, eyes burning, talons gleaming dully, to claim its prize.

Suddenly, in a flash of realisation, you realise what the source of the noises is: the old, falling-apart bookcase in the corridor. One of the legs must have given way, and the tilt is tipping books one by one onto the floor. As you listen carefully, you can hear the quiet riffle of the pages as another tumbles to the ground. There ought to be one last thud and… yes. Silence once more descends, and with it, a soothing calm.

As you sink back into sleep, you glance around the room, still snugly cocooned, seeing the vague shapes becoming defined as your night vision improves. Your desk, chair and television all emerge out of the murk, imposing good, sane reality on the void of night. Then, just before you shut your eyes, you see something that makes the bottom of your stomach drop away into nothingness.

There, on the floor, is your duvet.

Your screams are muffled.

–
Credited to foreverandever.

The Memetic Symbol

Even as I come to the realization that nothing in this world can pierce the hopelessness that ruins every stimulus I can still come upon, I find a reliable sense of wonder when imagining how patient it has been. Its origins and its creation, its nature and its effects.

This always makes me shudder with a palpable sense of despair mixed with awe at my strange fate – I have regressed into sympathizing with it, into turning to its titanic lack of mercy and all-encompassing designs in order to feel anything. It is the only real thing, I guess. The only thing with a purpose left in it.

I used to be a studier of memetic theories – advanced sociology, with a specialization in all things information technology. I had written some well-respected studies on general behaviour on the internet – the spread of ideas, the way people communicate depending on the subject matter. “2 girls 1 cup”, but with more analysis, detachment and looking at how quickly things get attention, and how it is related to man’s creation of culture. I decided to turn towards outliers next, the fringes and the corners of the internet. Lost information.

I scoured for obscure P2Ps and used extensive programs to make my investigations go faster. I simply looked for anything forgotten, useless, half-cooked, unique, empty, lonely or downright useless on the internet. I figured it could become a book, a study or a decent hobby.

When I found it there was one thing that called to my attention – the channel name. I was using any and all ways to access any kind of IRC there was, trying to see what stood out. Where I saw it I have long since forgotten, but what I saw was exactly what I was looking for. The name of the channel was skewed at an angle rather than a smooth line of text with a designated box. Rather than text it was designated by a symbol, and not the kind available through any unicode or any script I knew of. Yet upon examination of the site’s code there was nothing indicating an image rather than a script. In fact, there was nothing indicating that the channel could even exist – the script didn’t allow for more than a few channels, and the one with the symbol made one too many.

The next day I took my hard-drive to the garage, and then prepared to hook up my spare with my trusty screen and keyboard. Upon connecting I noticed something that made my face lock and prickly moisture form underneath my eyelids. The letters, arrows and other symbols on the keyboard had been… Usurped. Absorbed. Eaten. The symbol had taken every spot. On the screen’s frame the name “PHILIPS” had been replaced with a row of seven symbols. A bag of snacks lying on my desk had met the same change, and only the symbols could be read. Stunned as I was my mind didn’t take to work until I accidentally glanced at my watch and saw that I was late. The more profane, sheltered part of my brain won me over, declaring the whole thing an impressive prank designed by a pair of friends noted for their odd humor and knowledge of my new hobby. It even assured me they could have made the snacks bag simply to test their commitment. I took the bag and everything affected along with the hard-drive, and with a flash of instinct I threw them into a rocky ditch on my way to work.

Continue Reading…

Hope

A gentle breeze blew through the little valley, pushing the perfectly formed clouds leisurely across the sky. The tall, green grass echoed the movement in the sky above, swaying gently as the cool sunlight reached across to the distant horizon. Birds sang soothingly in a tree atop a slight hill, casting shade upon a lone figure.

He shifted slightly in his sleep, and gradually awoke. The man stood up slowly, shakily, and gazed around.

He had not seen such beauty in eons.

The man knew this place. He placed one foot in front of the other, and began to move forward. His progress was slow, painful even, but his pace quickened with each step. Soon, he was dashing carefree along the valley, his footsteps light and easy.

He climbed a hill, and was able to see a small town in the distance. He had made good time. The sun was still high in the sky.

The man ran down the hill, towards the little bundle of houses. The sun sank gradually behind him, and the clouds darkened subtly.

The man’s steps were now huge, bounding leaps. The man soared over serene fields of flowers, full of life and vibrantly colored. The sun sank still lower, shooting the cloudy sky with many beautiful hues.

The man leapt, and flew through the air, surrounded by such indescribable beauty that tears streamed down his face. Still, he pushed towards the town. Still, the sun sank; the clouds gathered.

He was now near enough that he could see the many inhabitants of the little town. All his friends, all his family, merely a heartbeat away. A tiny sob escaped the man’s throat as he saw his wife and children standing at the edge of town, waiting for him. He pushed off from the ground with all his might, propelling himself into their welcoming arms.

The sun met the horizon, and the world was consumed in fire. A pair of hounds rushed out from the flames, and grabbed the man, dragging him back to the earth. The man grasped for his family, but the creatures held him just out of reach. The animals dragged the man back towards the fire, as the clouds blotted out the sky, and began to rain fire down onto the little village, killing its inhabitants and twisting the landscape.

The man sobbed in horror as he watched his world being destroyed again. He had almost made it, this time.

Hell would be easy, if not for hope.

–
Credited to Dirjel Junshin